Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Dell T3600 Workstation

Some additional tidbits about the Dell T3600 Workstation:

1) There are a number of SAS/SATA ports on the motherboard but they are currently not enabled so you can only use two of the SATA ports on the motherboard.

2) The Intel RAID manager is also currently not enabled.

3) To address the above two items, Dell has the PERC H310 RAID card. The SFF8087 cable that ships with the machine has two ports and goes to the standard disk bays.

4) The difference between the 3.5" and 2.5" disk configuration appears to be just with the disk caddy.  I had hoped that the 2.5" disk config would be better tailored for having 4 2.5" disks in the disk area but it does not appear to be the case (or perhaps you have to order more than 1 2.5" disk).

To add some more disks to the system, I'm using the Vantec EZ Swap F4 enclosure.  The SFF8087 cable that comes with the machine has power built in so you need another cable. I found a StarTech cable on Amazon that works fine and plugged it into the other port on the H310.

I went with four 750GB Seagate hybrid disks in a RAID5 config.  I was thinking of using the two onboard drive bays for a RAID 1 boot/OS set using the Sandisk 240GB SSDs but decided to wait for now.

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